Thursday, July 10, 2014

Week 7...arrived in Argentina!

Hola Familia y Amigos!

I´m in Argentina right now, thats super crazy. At this very moment I am sitting between an argentine teenager who keeps trying to pop a pimple on his arm and my companion, Elder Webb, in some cyber cafe in downtown Santa Rosa. I am currently assigned to serve in Barrio 3 of Santa Rosa, which is some minor city in the middle of no where in the north west of my mission. This is definetly a different country. I would like to describe Santo Rosa as a cross between mexico, a little bit of europe, and a large poop. Not that I don´t love it here, the people are awesome and I´m having a great time but mmmaannn this place is very very ugly. Argentines here have a lot of standards but infrastructure is not one of them. The houses are just cement boxes and and the insides are have no rhyme or reason to their decorating. I like to think that when they want to spruce up the room, they think "This (insert random decoration here) is nice, I think it is beautiful. I am going to put this next to twenty other unrelated beautiful things on this cupboard in a unorganized pile, or maybe I will hang it on the wall in a wierd place. That would look nice." The people are very intersesting here and this is one of the poorest, if not the poorest part of my mission. (The kid sitting next to me just started yelling at his video game.) The people live in pretty much squalor, but then they go and buy a flat screen tv, I have no idea how that works. Despite all of this, I love it here and the guachos (look it up on google images) are so cool.

My companion, Elder Webb, is the bomb. He calls me "Hijo" which means son. He is from gilbert arizona and has about a year of his mission done. Luckily he is fluent in spanish because I am not. It turns out that we learned a mexican spanish at the mtc, which would be fine but here they speak a lot differently. In other spanish countries, the letters Y and LL make a ja sound, but here they make a "sh" sound. You wouldn´t think that makes much of a difference, but oh, it does. When people talk, I hear "aSHo aoSHo aSHo SH SH SH SH!" Its not spanish, I swear. I manage to understand what they are saying when talking about gospel things, but other than that, I get nothing. Luckily Elder Webb helps me out a ton. So far I have testified to a couple people about what we´re saying and also prayed a whole ton, but next week, I am going to start helping teach lessons.

Its not really dangerous here, we´re almost always home by 9. The only thing we have to watch for is chorros (no, not the delicous treat) who are just drunks who sit on the corner and drink and occasionaly break into houses, but they never really give us trouble, just swear at us a bit. The crazy part is the amount of dogs they have here, every single house has a terrifiying dog in front of it to keep out the chorros. On top of that, these dogs aren´t spayed or nuetered so the amount of strays is ridicoulous. If I had a dollar for every time I have been barked at so far, I´d be very rich. Some times the strays like to follow us around and then we form a pack until they get chased away by the other dogs whose territories we walk in.